Cabka Brand Guidelines: The 1994 Thuringian Recycler Turning Mixed Plastic Into Pallets

A plastics recycler in Thuringia.

Cabka makes pallets and large containers, and most of what it sells begins as plastic waste. The company says it was founded in 1994 by Gat Ramon in Weira, Thuringia, in eastern Germany, and that it made its name by developing a way to process mixed plastic waste from households and industry. Euronext, the stock-exchange operator, named Ramon as the company’s founder when Cabka came to the Amsterdam market in 2022.

The company’s own timeline describes a steady move from recycling into product making. Cabka says that in 1998 it designed and produced lightweight, nestable plastic pallets made from recycled material — pallets that sit inside one another when empty — and began selling them internationally, and it describes them as the first of their kind. In 2005, it says, it opened its first recycling and production plant in the United States, near St. Louis, Missouri, and in 2008 it added a sales office and production in Valencia, Spain.

An independent report from that period confirms the shape of the business. Writing in November 2012, the trade journal American Shipper listed Cabka’s locations as Weira and Berlin in Germany, St. Louis in North America and Valencia in Spain. It also described what the company was then known for: inexpensive one-way pallets for export, built to be shipped out with goods and not returned.

Cabka also describes its recycling roots as the core of the brand. It says recycling has been part of the company for more than 25 years, that it saw an opportunity in waste, and that it combines product design with engineering to get the most from its pallets before they are recycled at the end of their lives. Its website calls the company a specialist in plastic pallets and large containers, and the same pages describe pallets for export, for warehouse racking and for repeated use in closed loops.

A merger with Innova Packaging Systems.

The decisive step came in 2012. According to American Shipper, the holding company of CABKA North America and CABKA GmbH merged with the Belgian firm IPS – Innova Packaging Systems, based in Ypres, under a newly formed CABKA Group. The two sides were complementary: Cabka was strong in one-way export pallets, while IPS concentrated on multi-use pallets and served the Benelux countries, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Spain, with a site at Zaragoza. Until a joint brand was announced, the report said, both labels would stay in use.

Gat Ramon, then director and management spokesman of the new group, told the journal that the companies wanted to grow together through a strong range and continued innovation, and that they planned a production line with a recycling plant for mixed plastics near Ypres. The combined group would have about 390 employees, roughly two-thirds from Cabka and one-third from IPS. That report printed the name in capitals, CABKA; the company now writes it Cabka.

Cabka says it went on to buy the Belgian plastic pallet maker Eryplast in 2015, and that in 2018 it opened an innovation centre in Valencia, where teams work on material formulations, processing and products designed around recycled content.

Today the company presents two families of product. The first is plastic pallets, which it groups as euro pallets, nestable pallets, rackable pallets and export pallets, among others. The second is pallet boxes and large containers, along with sleeve packs — collapsible containers made of a pallet base, a sleeve and a lid. Cabka says that many of its pallets and containers are made from recycled plastic and that all are recyclable, and it offers custom designs and tracking services alongside its standard lines.

The company says it has six production sites in Germany, the United States, Belgium and Spain, employs more than 700 people and supplies customers in more than 80 countries; Euronext gave a similar figure of some 700 full-time staff in Europe and the United States in 2022.

Returnable packaging and pooling.

Pallet pooling and returnable packaging companies sell something unusual: the use of an object rather than the object itself. A pool operator owns pallets, crates or containers, hires them to manufacturers and growers, and collects them again after delivery. One example is CHEP, whose pallets are rented rather than sold, ABC Radio National noted in 2014, so the company keeps ownership of each one through its working life.

Because the equipment keeps moving between companies, colour does much of the identifying work. Cabinet magazine described in 2014 how CHEP’s blue pallets, stencilled “Property of CHEP,” stand out among plain timber pallets in American yards, alongside red pallets belonging to a smaller rental company, PECO. In the produce trade the recognisable object is the folding plastic crate: reusable plastic containers, or RPCs, that travel from the grower to the supermarket, often serve as the display on the shop floor, and fold flat for the return trip, as English Wikipedia describes IFCO’s system.

Behind the coloured equipment sits a network of depots and service centres where pallets and crates are inspected, repaired, washed and sent out again. English Wikipedia, citing Brambles’ 2025 results, puts CHEP’s network at more than 750 service centres; IFCO calls its own wash-and-return loop the SmartCycle. Alongside the pool operators are manufacturers of plastic pallets, bulk boxes and reusable crates.

The sector meets at intralogistics and materials-handling fairs, among them LogiMAT at the Stuttgart Trade Fair Centre and ProMat in Chicago. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it now, and what it says about its products — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Weira to Euronext Amsterdam.

Cabka became a listed company on 1 March 2022. Euronext announced that day that Cabka had joined Euronext Amsterdam under the ticker CABKA, through its acquisition by Dutch Star Companies TWO, a special purpose acquisition company that had itself been listed in November 2020; the combined company was renamed Cabka N.V. Euronext said it was the second such business combination completed on its markets that year. At the listing, Tim Litjens was chief executive, and the founder, Gat Ramon, was vice-chairman of the supervisory board.

Euronext described Cabka as a company that recycles plastics from post-consumer and post-industrial waste into reusable pallets and large containers. Euronext’s announcement also said the company closed the loop from waste to recycling to manufacturing, backed by its own innovation centre.

The leadership has since changed. By April 2026, Packaging Europe reported, Alex Masharov was Cabka’s chief executive. That report covered a new product made with the pooling company Tosca: the Tosca Circular Pallet CP 1208, a euro-sized pallet of 1,200 by 800 millimetres made from recycled plastic, with RFID tags for tracking and a design intended to be repaired, reused and recycled within a pooling system. Masharov said in the report that the pallet showed how recycled plastic could be turned into transport equipment for retail and fast-moving consumer goods supply chains.

Cabka has published its own case study of the pallet, filed under plastic pallets in the pooling industry. It describes Tosca as managing pallets as pooled assets — deploying, recovering, washing, repairing and redistributing them as a service — and presents Cabka as the maker behind the design.

For a design guide, Cabka shows how an industrial maker can build its identity around a material story — waste turned into product — rather than around a single product. Compare Tosca, its partner on the circular pallet, and Schoeller Allibert, another maker of returnable plastic packaging. For this guide we use resin green, regrind grey and pale polymer with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cabka’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.